As a free option, it’s limited, but it’s still a decent solution for small sites.

Once you create an account, go to the Backlinks panel, click “Link Alerts,” and then input your website and email:

You’ll then get a daily email that lets you know whether any new backlinks were detected.

Alternatively,Ahrefs(a paid tool) also hasthis feature, but it has a more reliable (and sizeable) database.

You can either look at new links manually by going to the “new links” page:

Or you can also go to the “email notifications” section and change the status of new/lost backlink notifications to “Daily”:

Again, you’ll get a nice email summary every day.

You don’t need to do anything big with these email summaries. Just take a 10-second scan of them for anything out of the ordinary.

Step #2 – Monitor your top backlinks

There’s one more type of negative SEO attack you should be aware of although it’s far less common than the ones I mentioned above.

Sometimes, someone doing negative SEO will create a new email account similar to yours (e.g., Neil.Patel38388@gmail.com) and then email sites that link to you asking them to take down the link to your site.

This is clearly unethical, but some people don’t care.

While you can’t monitorallof your links, you can keep track of the best ones.

You can find your best ones with any backlink database tool. On Ahrefs, you type in your site in the “site explorer” tool, and then click on “links” in the sidebar:

This will bring up a list of links to your site, sorted by URL rank by default.

Get to know your top 20 or so links well because they’re likely the ones that will be targeted.

From here, do two things:

pay special attention to them in the “links lost” section of those emails we set up in step 1

check all of them manually once in awhile (maybe once or twice a month) just in case one slipped by. You could create a tool to do this for you if you’d like.

Finally, youmaybe able to prevent a negative SEO attack from being successful by doing all your outreach from an email address for your domain (e.g., Neil@QuickSprout.com).

Then, add a line to your signature that reads something like this:

This is the official email address I use forallmatters regarding (site name).

That way, some of your contacts may notice something fishy when they get a removal request from a different email.